Solutions

All of NTT ICT’s solutions will provide you with ways to improve and expand your business, whether by using the latest technology, reducing IT expenditure or filling gaps in your business’s internal IT skills.

Resources

While cloud adoption is high in Australia, enterprises have learned the hard way how to make the cloud work for their businesses.

Recently, those learnings have extended to the number of clouds that an enterprise will typically need to run.

Cloud’s earliest adopters were told - and sold - the benefits of shifting most of their workloads into a single cloud platform.

But it is fair to say many enterprises now would be wary or uncomfortable with that degree of lock-in, not least because of the difficulties involved in moving everything in.

Most enterprises today find themselves needing to adopt a multi-cloud approach. This is usually a combination of one or more hyperscale public cloud providers, SaaS applications and private cloud solutions.

Between one-quarter and one-third of all enterprises in the cloud work with four or more cloud vendors, according to a study by 451 Research and Microsoft. That might be overly-conservative: IDC believes multi-cloud adoption could be pursued by in excess of 85 percent of enterprises.

At NTT ICT, we see customers pursuing a particular variation of a multi-cloud model.

An increasing proportion of customers that take colo space in our Sydney and Melbourne data centres are choosing to run workloads in colo and AWS public cloud, with the two linked using AWS Direct Connect.

AWS Direct Connect acts as a private, secure network connection between an enterprise and the public cloud. It is typically a fraction of the cost of sending data to and from the cloud via the public internet; this is important because as environments become distributed, data needs to traverse back and forth between the cloud and the enterprise.

Finding a way to do that cost-effectively and securely is a key driver for whether the model will be successful or not.

We see customers adopting this model for many reasons.

We’ve discussed before that there may simply be discomfort in hosting everything with one provider. There may also be regulatory or compliance reasons why this can’t occur, or it might just be more cost-effective to host certain workloads in different places.

On a practical level, where the decision to go multi-cloud has been taken, and the clouds are to be a mix of public and private ones, it makes sense to locate the private cloud as close as possible to your preferred hyperscale provider.

Such a structure optimises the overall performance of the multi-cloud environment, reducing the costs of exchanging data between those clouds.

By co-locating your private cloud or self-managed infrastructure environment with NTT ICT, we can provide high speed connectivity directly into the AWS environment in Australia.

This has a number of advantages over co-locating these environments in non-AWS Direct Connect locations:

You are not paying network circuit costs on top of your AWS Direct Connect charges to first bring your data to the demarcation point between the public and private clouds;

You can more easily, and at higher speed, run truly hybrid or split environments where, for example, web front-end servers are hosted in AWS EC2, with backend databases hosted in a co-located private cloud environment;

You can more quickly stage and migrate workloads into (and out of when required) the AWS cloud platform; and

You can leverage AWS as a backup target without having to transit data over the internet or a costly WAN service.

Author Name: Matthew Allen

Matthew Allen is Director of Product Development at NTT Communications in Australia. Matthew is responsible for defining the local product roadmap and strategy for NTT, encompassing data centres, networks and cloud services.